This week, reports surfaced that someone had defaced the Green Mile actor’s grave with a racist image. According to a TMZ report, a friend of Duncan’s visited his grave this week and found a smiley face attached to the grave that looked suspiciously similar to a depiction of a Little Black Sambo.

However, it now appears that the smiley face was not intended as a racist slight against Duncan. LAist is now reporting that the object was left by an artist named Lisa Albanese. Albanese has stated that she did not intend to offend anyone and that she is “in shock and saddened” by the reaction her art has caused. She reportedly routinely leaves the smiley faces at celebrity grave sites and in other places around L.A., as she notes in a Facebook post from 2011.

Duncan was best known for his roles in movies such as The Green Mile, Armageddon, and Daredevil.

In a live Sky Sports interview, O’Grady stated that the European tour had accepted Garcia’s apology and that the “fried chicken” remark was a poor attempt at humor.

“We were convinced that he was trying to be funny,” said O’Grady. “We know the connotation in the United States. We accept all races on the European tour. We take it very strongly. Most of Sergio’s friends happen to be very, uh, colored athletes in the United States.”

Today, O’Grady has issued a formal apology to Tiger Woods and anyone else offended by the word he used.

“I deeply regret using an inappropriate word in a live interview for Sky Sports for which I unreservedly apologize,” said O’Grady.

Garcia has also apologized for his “fried chicken” remark.

“Most importantly, I want to apologise to Tiger and anybody that I could have offended by the comment I made and, you know, just say that I feel sick about it,” said Garcia. “I am truly, truly sorry and, you know, I hope that, you know, we can kinda settle down and hopefully move on.”

One Twitter user took issue with Rucker recently covering the Bob Dylan-inspired Old Crow Medicine Show hit “Wagon Wheel” at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

“Leave the country to white folk,” said user @pqkullman.

“WOW is this 2013 or 1913,” tweeted Rucker. “I’ll take my Grand Ole Opry membership and leave your racism. Wow.”.

“@pqkullman: @dariusrucker Leave country to the white folk”. WOW. Is this 2013 or 1913

— Darius Rucker (@dariusrucker) May 19, 2013

“@pqkullman: @dariusrucker Leave country to the white folk”. Ill take my grand ole Opry membership and leave your racism. Wow

— Darius Rucker (@dariusrucker) May 19, 2013

He was then asked why he responds to racists on Twitter:

“@urbaneremite: @dariusrucker serious question why do you respond to the racists?”So the world can see them.

— Darius Rucker (@dariusrucker) May 19, 2013

Since Sunday, Rucker has had to battle even more pointed racist tweets. Like this one, for instance:

“@ashleyzolanski: @dariusrucker nigger”. Holy crap!!

— Darius Rucker (@dariusrucker) May 22, 2013

According to a New York Daily News report, Columbia University is now supporting a change in the Lydia C. Roberts Graduate Fellowship and Lydia C. Roberts Traveling Fellowship. The scholarships are currently available only to students from Iowa who are Caucasian. The university has reportedly filed an affidavit in the Manhattan Supreme Court in favor of modifying the scholarship.

The scholarship was founded in 1920 by Lydia C. Chamberlain, who set out the criteria by which scholarship applicants should be judged. According to the Daily News, organizations such as the NAACP have been calling on Columbia to cut the scholarship for decades. The scholarship hasn’t been awarded since 1997, and at least one former student who received it and spoke with the Daily news claims not to have known that being white was a stipulation of the award.

The map was created by geography students at California’s Humboldt State University, the same group of people who brought us the post-election Twitter racism map back in November. Back then, they looked at racist tweets the focused on President Obama’s reelection and found that Mississippi and Alabama were the two hotbeds for such activity.

“Rather than focusing just on hate directed towards a single individual at a single point in time, we wanted to analyze a broader swath of discriminatory speech in social media, including the usage of racist, homophobic and ableist slurs,” say the researchers.

For instance, here’s the map of generally “homophobic” tweets, which are determined by the use of words like “dyke,” “fag,” “homo,” and “queer.”

And here’s the map of racist tweets – those containing the words “nigger,” “chink,” “wetback,” “gook,” or “spick”:

Of course, analysis like this is never going to be 100% accurate. Keyword analysis has inherent issues. For instance, the word “queer” is not always used in a derogatory, hate-filled manner. People could be tweeting out the word “fag” in another context, such as bemoaning its usage.

On the other hand, it’s hard to justify many used of words like “wetback” on Twitter. Sure, it’s not completely solid analysis, but it’s pretty close. You have to to imagine that the majority of people tweeting about fags, dykes, niggers, and chinks are doing so in a hateful manner.

But to completely cut out this sort of uncertainty, the researchers manually read and coded each tweets to judge the sentiment, “in order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama.” This way, they could know, for sure, whether a tweet that contained the word “queer” was actually posted in a hateful context.

Using DOLLY to search for all geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, we discovered 41,306 tweets containing the word ‘nigger’, 95,123 referenced ‘homo’, among other terms. In order to address one of the earlier criticisms of our map of racism directed at Obama, students at Humboldt State manually read and coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if the given word was used in a positive, negative or neutral manner. This allowed us to avoid using any algorithmic sentiment analysis or natural language processing, as many algorithms would have simply classified a tweet as ‘negative’ when the word was used in a neutral or positive way. For example the phrase ‘dyke’, while often negative when referring to an individual person, was also used in positive ways (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride”). The students were able to discern which were negative, neutral, or positive. Only those tweets used in an explicitly negative way are included in the map.

You can check out the full interactive map here, where you can zoom in to see specific concentrations of twitter hate speech.

[Floating Sheep via MIT Technology Review]

Jilani attended the dinner as a guest of her husband, a journalist; as the spouse of the invited guest, Jilani wasn’t allowed to attend the actual dinner, but instead would be spending the evening in a designated cocktail area with others. Soon after they parted company, however, Jilani realized her husband had her keys. Upon realizing she couldn’t contact him on his phone, she approached a group of security officers and asked if she could go into the ballroom just to get her keys. That’s when the trouble started.

“They refused to let me through,” Jilani wrote. “For the next half hour, they watched as I frantically called my husband but was unable to reach him. Then something remarkable happened. I watched as they let countless other women through — all Caucasian — without even asking to see their tickets. I asked why they were allowing them to go freely when they had just told me that I needed a ticket. Their response? “Well, now we are checking tickets.” He rolled his eyes and let another woman through, this time actually checking her ticket. His smug tone, enveloped in condescension, taunted, “See? That’s what a ticket looks like.”

Upon pressing the security officers as to why they would let others in without a ticket, Jilani was threatened by the guards, who said they would escort her out. Outraged, Jilani wrote a seething editorial on Huffington Post, where she spoke about the injustice done to anyone with dark skin and a foreign name, now more than ever.

“I explained that I am a physician, that my husband is a noted journalist for a major American newspaper, and that our guest was an esteemed, Oscar-nominated director. They did not believe me. Never mind that the American flag flew proudly outside of our home for years, with my father taking it inside whenever it rained to protect it from damage. Never mind that I won “Most Patriotic” almost every July 4th growing up. Never mind that I have provided health care to some of America’s most underprivileged, even when they have refused to shake my hand because of my ethnicity,” she wrote.

As of now, the White House has had no response about the incident, though that is likely to change soon; Ms. Jilani’s story has gone viral.

Instead of the receipt saying “Hyun Lee,” it said “Ching Chong Lee. The Smoking Gun has an image of the alleged receipt:

Wikipedia describes the term in question:

Ching chong is a pejorative term sometimes employed by speakers of English to mock people of Chinese ancestry, or other Asians who may be mistaken for Chinese. Several public commentators have characterized the term as derogatory while noting that assaults or physical intimidation of Asians are often accompanied by racial slurs or imitation Chinese.

NBA star Shaquille O’Neal once famously used the slur, when he said, “Tell Yao Ming, ‘Ching chong yang, wah, ah soh”.

ABC News has an interview with Lee talking about the distress she feels from the incident:

According to Lee’s lawyer, the company did not fire the employee responsible, nor offer an apology.

It appears that Brad Paisley and LL Cool J have yet to eliminate racism.

Good luck trying to find it on YouTube. You can find it on Spotify, if you’re so inclined. Here’s what some are saying about it on Twitter:

Some of the reactions on YouTube have been interesting:

Here are the lyrics (via AZLyrics):

To the man that waited on me at the Starbucks down on Main, I hope you understand
When I put on that t-shirt, the only thing I meant to say is I’m a Skynyrd fan
The red flag on my chest somehow is like the elephant in the corner of the south
And I just walked him right in the room
Just a proud rebel son with an ‘ol can of worms
Lookin’ like I got a lot to learn but from my point of view

Oh, Dixieland
(The relationship between the Mason-Dixon needs some fixin’)
I hope you understand what this is all about
(Quite frankly I’m a black Yankee but I’ve been thinkin’ about this lately)
I’m a son of the new south
(The past is the past, you feel me)
And I just want to make things right
(Let bygones be bygones)
Where all that’s left is southern pride
(RIP Robert E. Lee but I’ve gotta thank Abraham Lincoln for freeing me, know what I mean)
It’s real, it’s real
It’s truth

According to an Associated Press report, Wilson died at a South Carolina hospital at the age of 76. Wilson’s wife, Judy, related that he had struggled with hearth and lung problems for years, and recently contracted the flu.

It isn’t often that members of the Ku Klux Klan publicly renounce their views on race, but Wilson made news with a very public apology in 2009. He apologized directly to John Lewis, a U.S. Representative from Georgia. Wilson had reportedly taken part in a beating which included Lewis during a civil rights march in the early 60s.

Wilson admitted to being a Ku Klux Klan member in the past, but stated that he could not reconcile his religious beliefs with his racism. He recalled that he attended cross burnings, hung effigies, and threw fruit at black men during his time with the Klan.

Lewis has stated that Wilson’s apology was meaningful to him as it was the first apology he received for the violence he encountered during his time as a freedom rider in 1961.

Still, it’s an interesting, if incomplete study. Here’s the abstract:

A Google search for a person’s name, such as “Trevon Jones”, may yield a personalized ad for public records about Trevon that may be neutral, such as “Looking for Trevon Jones? …” or may be suggestive of an arrest record, such as “Trevon Jones, Arrested?…”. This writing investigates the delivery of these kinds of ads by Google AdSense using a sample of racially associated names and finds statistically significant discrimination in ad delivery based on searches of 2184 racially associated personal names across two websites. First names, previously identified by others as being assigned at birth to more black or white babies, are found predictive of race (88% black, 96% white), and those assigned primarily to black babies, such as DeShawn, Darnell and Jermaine, generated ads suggestive of an arrest in 81 to 86% of name searches on one website and 92 to 95 percent on the other, while those assigned at birth primarily to whites, such as Geoffrey, Jill and Emma, generated more neutral copy: the word “arrest” appeared in 23 to 29 percent of name searches on one site and 0 to 60 percent on the other.

On the more ad trafficked website, a black-identifying name was 25% more likely to get an ad suggestive of an arrest record. A few names did not follow these patterns: Dustin, a name predominantly given to white babies, generated an ad suggestive of arrest 81 and 100 percent of the time. All Ads return results for actual individuals and ads appear regardless of whether the name has an arrest record in the company’s database. Notwithstanding these findings, the company maintains Google received the same ad text for groups of last names (not first names), raising questions as to whether Google’s advertising technology exposes racial bias in society and how ad and search technology can develop to assure racial fairness

It goes pretty in depth. You can read the full report here (pdf).

The Huffington Post picked up the story, and shares a statement from a Google spokesperson:

“AdWords does not conduct any racial profiling,” the spokesman wrote in an email. “We also have an ‘anti’ and violence policy which states that we will not allow ads that advocate against an organization, person or group of people. It is up to individual advertisers to decide which keywords they want to choose to trigger their ads.”

Sweeney acknowledges in the report that the study ultimately raises more questions than it answers, and says that the paper is just a start, and that more research is needed. However, after all of her research, she concludes the paper saying, “There is discrimination in delivery of these ads.”